HubPages Hub Score Experiment - Adding a Summary

Updated on December 16, 2012

I wrote my first HubPages hub back at the end of 2010. At 77 hubs, I don’t have a huge amount of articles on HubPages and primarily used it as a source of backlinks for personal websites before the Google Penguin and Panda updates got in the way of that backlinking strategy.

After several months not publishing, I got back in the swing this November in hopes of creating a more lucrative source of passive income. Although I’m still not producing new content at any amazing rate, I have been trying to give my older hubs a bit of a facelift. One metric I’m looking at is individual Hub Scores.

My top articles have scores in the 70’s but I noticed that I also had several in the 40’s. I also took notice of the ‘A’ beside my hub titles on my stats page. This signifies that there I did not write a summary for any of these articles. The summary is not mandatory so I’ve ignored it in the past. In my latest attempts to boost my hub scores, I’ve focused on this feature.

As an experiment, I took five of my lowest scoring hubs and changed nothing except for the addition of summary. Once the edit took place, each article entered the HubPages ‘Quality Assessment Process’ which usually takes about 24 hours. Coming out of the QAP, the five hubs on average gained more than 10 points in their hub scores. The following day, each had average over a 15 point jump.

The articles:

‘New York Islanders Hall of Famer Denis Potvin’. This article profiling the hockey career of New York Islanders great defenseman Denis Potvin, was originally published on April 22, 2012. The article began the experiment with a hub score of 49. After 24 hours, it was at 54 and two days later, it was at 60. This was the lowest improvement of the five articles.

‘Toronto Maple Leafs Single Season Kings of the Sin Bin’ featured three of the most penalized players in Maple Leafs history. This hub was published on February 27, 2012 and also had a hub score of 49 at the start of the experiment. After 24 hours, the article had the highest score of the five at 62. The following day, the hub sat at a score of 66.

‘3 St Louis Blues Head Coaches to Win the Jack Adams Award’ is an article featuring the ever-exciting Jack Adams Award that goes to the top coach in the NHL. This hub was originally published on March 2, 2012 and its score had dropped to 49. After 24 hours, the score increased to 61 and was up to 67 after two days.

‘1966-67 Chicago Black Hawks – The Stanley Cup That Slipped Away’ is an article about a Black Hawks team that dominated the NHL during the regular season but tanked in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. This hub is the oldest of the five, published on September 17, 2011. The hub score at the start of the experiment was 48. After 24 hours, there was a 13 point increase to 61 and on the second day that score stood at 67.

By updating, each article now has the black ‘H’ beside. This means the hub is of ‘high quality’ and will be featured within the HubPages environment and ‘has the opportunity to be listed in search engine results’.

So, are these score improvements solely due to the addition of the summary? The Hub Score algorithm is based on traffic, as well as quality. Could it be that the improvement is partly due to internal traffic created in the Quality Assessment Process? Regardless, adding the summary has certainly had a positive effect and only time will tell if it is long term.

Comments 1 comment

Hi, I found this article to be very interesting. I joined HubPages 4 months ago but hadn't really been active. I've recently started hubbing and trying to educate myself on the ins and outs of doing so.

I too noticed the symbols that made me aware that I hadn't written any summaries. I'm going to try to update a few of mine and see what happens. Thanks for sharing this information!